"What we're seeing now is there are jobs. People are hiring. People are definitely hiring, but the war for talent is real. The good people are in demand. The perceived bad people are not. And what's happening now is I think there's another eight weeks of a window for the long-term unemployed senior executives."George Bradt

Welcome to a special Leadership Channel podcast on Totalpicture Radio, with Peter Clayton reporting from Stamford, CT. My guest today is a frequent contributor to TPR, George Bradt, Managing Director, of PrimeGenesis, a consultancy focused on transition acceleration and executive onboarding.

I would encourage you to do a search on TPR for PrimeGenesis - you find a treasure trove of thought-provoking leadership podcasts with George, and many of the contributors to his book, ONBOARDING: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time. (Amazon link).

Bradt is the author of The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results - which is, in my opinion, a must read for any executive moving into a new company or a new role, or contemplating a career shift. Prior to founding PrimeGenesis, George served as chief executive of J.D. Power's Power Information Network spin off and in general management, marketing and sales at Coca-Cola in Europe and Asia, Procter & Gamble and Unilever.

Recently, George started a weekly column in Forbes titled The New Leader's Playbook.

Program Transcript

George Bradt, PrimeGenesis: TotalPicture Radio Interview

Welcome to a special Leadership Channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting from Stamford, Connecticut. My guest today is frequent contributor to TotalPicture Radio, George Bradt, managing director of PrimeGenesis, a consultancy focused on transition acceleration and executive onboarding. I would encourage you to visit TotalPicture.com and do a search for PrimeGenesis. You'll find a treasure trove of thought-provoking podcasts with George and many contributors to his book Onboarding: How to Get Your New Employees Up to Speed in Half the Time. George is also the author of The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan which is, in my opinion, a must read for any executive moving into a new company or a new role or contemplating a career shift.

Prior to founding PrimeGenesis, George served as a chief executive of J.D. Power's Power Information Network spin off and in general management, marketing and sales at Coca-Cola in Europe and Asia, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever, and I encourage all of you to stay tuned to the end of this interview because George is going to make some projections that you'll want to hear.

George, welcome back to TotalPicture Radio. It's great to have you on the show.

George: Always good to talk to you and it seems we're doing it more and more frequently as time goes on.

Peter: We sure are. George, you've recently started a weekly column in Forbes titled The New Leader's Playbook. Can you give us an overview of your column?

George: I'd be delighted.

Peter: Good.

George: The New Leader's Playbook is a weekly column as you said, and it highlights examples of things that went well for others in leadership roles so that new leaders can learn. Each week I focus on one leader and one step of playbook I point out what the leader did right and then I'll give people some other things to consider. My working theory, as I think you know, is that since we're all new leaders all the time, this column should be helpful to everybody all the time.

Peter: Alright, so I want to start out talking about your latest column which just went live today on Forbes.com and you just mentioned to me that now you will also be cross-posting these on The Huffington Post. It's titled Top Executive Recruiters Agree on Three Key Job Interview Questions, and it's a profile of your interview with Kevin Kelly who is the CEO of Heidrick & Struggles. I guess what we should do is first start out by saying what are these three top interview questions?

George: It's not so much that they're the top interview questions; they're the only interview questions and they are: Can you do the job? Will you love the job? Can we tolerate working with you? Or strengths, motivation and fit.

I would suggest any question anybody has ever asked you in a job interview is either a subset of one those three questions or a way to probe it a little more in-depth.

Peter: Let's go a little bit in-depth with this because you also posted a YouTube video today that actually is linked on TotalPicture.com, so you can take a look at it, and it's basically this idea of stop the games and it's all about transparency.

George: This actually came to me earlier this week. As I was thinking about this, people do a lot of interview training and they do practice and they get coached on all sides and they come in and they think they're on stage and they want to perform and everybody wants to look good and I got to tell you, I think that gets in the way because I don't think there are winners and losers in interviews. Yes of course, the person being interviewed wants the person interviewing them to offer them a job, but it's really about finding the right match.

You don't really want to be offered the wrong job. You don't want somebody to convince you to take a job that you're going to fail in. You want to be offered the right job and you want to be offered the right job for the right reason because interviewing is often your first contact with the company that you may be eventually joining, so it's part of your onboarding. Everything communicates all the way through, so this transparency idea is stop the games, stop the posturing, and if everybody would just open up and treat this as - ready for this - a rational conversation between two people trying to figure out there's a match; we can get rid a lot of the games, a lot of the posturing, and I think the whole process will be much more effective.

Peter: Back to the interview with Kevin Kelly, what was his thoughts and reaction to the only three things that are talked about in a job interview?

George: Actually, there were two interviews. The primary interview was with Kevin and then I also talked to Bill Guy who's the head of the Cornerstone Group, so I got two recruiters and obviously, I have talked to more than these two recruiters through the years, but I started by asking Kevin whether he agreed and it was his words. He said those are the three key interview questions and then we went into it.

Okay, what does this mean? Kevin had a really good perspective on strengths. He said, "Nobody hires recruiters to just pass résumés along. They don't need us." And he didn't say it but particularly in the world of all the social media and LinkedIn, search firms don't need to search so much anymore, but what they do need to do is help with the evaluation.

So when it came to strengths, Kevin talked about how his job is to go beyond that piece of paper, that résumé, and get at specific examples of what worked for executives in the past and what didn't work for them and then sort of in referencing his recent article in the Harvard Business Review, it turns out that the strengths required early on as you move up the ladder, more of the technical skills, they're always important but at the senior levels, there are other strengths that become much more important as well, which are - wait for it - that would be leadership and interacting with other people. And so he so probes those as well.

That's the strengths.

Peter: Obviously you've spoken to an awful lot of recruiters over the years; what has changed over the last couple of years in a way these people at Heidrick & Struggles or Bill Guy or any of these other recruiters go about doing their jobs?

George: I do think the big difference is driven by the internet and then there's also the whole recession and coming out of it, which we can talk about as well.

Peter: Right.

George: But what the internet has done is it's made it easier for people to find people.

Peter: Right.

George: So the search part of their job is less important. So you can find certainly the active candidates. It's always hard to find whatever they call them - the passive candidates - but the people that aren't necessarily looking for a job, search people still have to do that and then the big thing they have to do is the evaluation of strengths and then understanding the different motivations and then certainly figuring out the cultural fit.

Peter: To your point earlier George, finding passive candidates is going on LinkedIn and doing a Boolean search.

George: Yeah.

Peter: That's it.

George: It's not hard.

Peter: Right.

George: You know more about that than I do and that's not hard.

Peter: Right. Let's talk about some of the other columns that you've done for Forbes which I found particular interesting and obviously one of the big career transitions that have gotten a lot of press is Robert Gibbs moving from the White House to Facebook. What's your reaction to that?

George: My reaction to that is if it happens, it's risky at best and I took a look at cultural fit there and then we did a more in-depth article in a magazine called Human Resource Executive where we dug into it a little deeper. And as I looked at the cultural fit, we deployed this new tool, this brave tool, where we look at behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values, and the environment, and as I looked at what Gibbs has been used to and what he might face at Facebook kind of said, okay behaviors yeah, that's close enough; attitudes, who knows but probably not that big a deal; values, yeah probably close enough, it's not clear.

The two issues were the environment and relationships. In the environment, I would argue that the White House where Gibbs was Press Secretary is perhaps a little more walled and a little more formal than what he's going to deal with at Facebook, but I said okay, he can get over that. It's the relationships that are the real risk, because he has been used to very formal relationships versus less formal at Facebook and think about the issues he's been dealing with. He's been dealing with some of the world's most intractable issues around the globe and now he's going to go to an organization that is figuring out how to get kids of all ages to poke each other more.

Peter: But at the same time, this guy has got a pretty incredible rolodex.

George: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, in terms of strengths, not a problem. In terms of motivation, I can see why he's going to do it, but there's a very strong potential fit issue and the question is whether it's essentially insurmountable or manageable. If it's insurmountable, he's going to fail. They're going to hate him. They're going to kick him out. It's just going to be ugly. If it's manageable, the people at Facebook need to invest heavily in assimilating him into the culture. It's just not going to happen naturally.

Peter: I want to talk to you about what you referred to as your airplane interview. You met this woman on a flight who is an executive with IBM and her name is Sue Hed and she has a job that requires her to work with one of IBM's biggest competitors Oracle but at the same time, they do a lot of partnerships and so that's a really difficult role to be in and tell us a little bit about Sue and how she has addressed this issue.

George: Well, not only is it a difficult role but it was a difficult interview because as you said we did do it on an airplane and there were lots of screaming kids, but what Sue is facing is co-opetition in the purest sense as you alluded to. There are places where Oracle has business that IBM doesn't do. There are places that IBM has business that Oracle doesn't do. There are places where they go head to head (pun intended), and what she has done is she's building that alliance with them.

She's focused on the areas where they need to work together to create value for the end client. Great, if it's Oracle's business, have at it. If it's IBM's business, IBM should have at it. Sometimes they compete, but where they can do a better job together than either of them can separately, that's where she's focused.

And what she did in this context of co-opetition, what made me stop and say, "Wait, hang on a second Sue. This is an article for Forbes," and it was great fun because I literally pulled out my computer, wrote the article and then showed it to her and then when I was done, I said, "Okay, so I need you to send me a picture." She goes "I don't have a picture." I pulled out my iPhone, took a picture of her on the plane, so if you go back and look at the article, it's her on the airplane. But what she did was she focused on getting early wins in what she called manageable geographies. Instead of starting in the United States or the UK or whatever, they started in Australia and Turkey and she over-invested.

She spent a lot of time there pulling the alliance together there on a local basis before she rolled it out to bigger markets, and when she rolled it out to bigger markets, she found that the buy in was great in other countries because they saw the success and had testimonials from their peers, so that's what excited me about Sue. Neat lady doing great stuff and I'm sure they will continue to do great stuff for the joint clients where they need to.

Peter: I want to talk about one of your onboarding success stories in Forbes and that is Ajay Bange who moved from Citi to become CEO of MasterCard. Tell us about this transition and what Ajay did right.

George: Ajay is one of the superstars who did a lot of things right. In this article, I focused on the way he leveraged his Fuzzy Front End, the time between accepting the job and starting the job and I was particularly impressed by the way he created two Fuzzy Front Ends, so he accepted the job and then he had that time, the time between then and when he started, but then his whole first job as president of the company was really one big Fuzzy Frond End for becoming CEO. He worked it out with the outgoing CEO in advance where it was a three-stage process where the CEO was there as CEO with Ajay as president then the CEO was there as chairman in an office next to Ajay when Ajay was CEO and then the CEO went away. The old CEO went away, so Ajay could be on his own. This guy gets it. He'd been at Citi for 14 years where he was Mr. Insider. He knew everything and as he said...

Peter: He was very senior executive at Citi.

George: Very senior, very respected, people loved him and he said Citi, it got into his blood. It was like a reverse osmosis and so he just knew it. He knew everything about Citi and he recognized when he went to MasterCard, he was going to be Mr. Outsider. The way he put it was he said, "I need to become Mr. Insider before I can get anything done. One of my old partners used to say 'nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care,'" and so what Ajay did that was just magnificent was he spent about 10 months wandering in and out of people's offices, flopping into chairs and saying, "Hi, I'm Ajay. Tell me about you." Not preaching, listening - but it was directed listening, directed learning, a great example of leveraging the Fuzzy Frond End to build relationships and learning.

Peter: As such, it has become a very successful transition at MasterCard.

George: Absolutely.

Peter: From the good to the bad George, you just recently wrote the headline Cusack Capital CEO's Second Act Disaster (Onboarding Done Wrong). Tell us about this.

George: Well, all factual New Leader's Playbook articles are about things that went well. Other people are digging into things that went wrong, and I do that in some other publications or on the PrimeGenesis blog but really I'm focused on things that went well. I made an exception here for Jimmy Cusack because he completely, completely screwed up his due diligence and failed to take advantage of his Fuzzy Frond End and it led to a major meltdown.

In fact, his story is so bad that it reads like a novel, because it actually is a novel. He doesn't exist. When the author came to me and said, "Hey, I got this new book coming out." I said, "Boy, I'd love to interview your lead character," and went in and did the interview with him and he told it to me as much as someone that doesn't exist can tell things to me.

Peter: He is a fictional character that doesn't exist, but his story is so - I've heard the story so many times where here's a guy who's in an industry that blew up: his hedge fund closed down and he was desperate to get back into the game. We've seen the story over and over again.

George: We had, which is partly why I wrote about it, because even though his specific story is fictional, it's really happening in a lot of other people and the lesson is do the due diligence. If it feels wrong, it probably is and by taking a job that you're maybe a little desperate for, your odds of having to do it again soon are greatly increased versus waiting a little while doing the real due diligence and getting the job that's the right match.

Peter: You've also covered some real turnaround stories, and one of those was Sam Martin with A&P. Tell us a little bit about his story and the whole process that he used in going into a company that obviously was in real trouble.

George: For the most part because the Forbes articles are all about highlighting things that went well, for the most part everybody wants to talk to me. I call them up and say, "Hey, doing an article in Forbes in two weeks, would you like to talk to me?" They go, "Yeah, sure." A&P wasn't so sure because they took a long time to get back to me. They looked at it and they said, "Eh, we're not sure this is right for us," because they're in the midst of a turnaround and whenever there's a turnaround, there's inevitably some good news and some bad news. So I was a little worried about the interview, and then I got on the phone with this guy Sam Martin and he was fantastic. He was just so clear on what was required, what he was doing and what he was going to do next and he was really transparent about the whole thing.

He really focused on five things. He said, "I've got to install a strong management team. I've got to strengthen liquidity. I've got to reduce structural and operating costs. I've got to improve the value proposition for customers and I've got to enhance customer's in-store experience.

Three things were interesting. One he was clear, he was consistent, he moved fast while over-communicating with everybody.

The second was it was a little counterintuitive to me. I'm a consumer marketer by background and I tend to think you start with the customers and what you've got to do is you first figure out the customers needs are and you start there. No. In the turnaround, he had to start thinking the right team to place and he moved really fast on that.

Then he had to strengthen this liquidity. For a company in and out around bankruptcy, cash is like oxygen; you can't do anything about the cash, and so he had to deal with that second.

And then the third thing was he had to get his base right. He had to get rid of some of the structural and operating costs, close some stores, reduce some things because if he didn't do those three, he would never have had a chance to improve the value proposition for customers and then implement it in the store.

It's a great story because every situation is different and check, we're all new leaders all the time and in some ways, we should all be treating the next hundred days like a turnaround. In this case, it really is.

Peter: I want to expand on that concept of we're all new leaders all the time and have you tell us about Mike Duke, the CEO at Wal-Mart. You wrote "Mike and his team are in touch with social, economic and political changes around the world and they constantly monitor the results of their own choices and actions so they can adjust as needed."

George: I'm guessing you and most of your listeners at this point understand that Wal-Mart is a pretty big company at this point.

Peter: Size of a good-sized country actually.

George: I was talking to one guy who went there and we were talking about the Fortune 100 list and he goes, "I used to work for Fortune 9, but now I'm going to Fortune 1," the top of the pile.

What really impressed me about Duke and his team was their ability to face the facts and make the changes. They're the size of a small country and a lot of times they're leading the way. When they say, "Okay, we're going to go green," it's like every supplier goes, "Okay, student body left, we're going to go green," and when they say we're going to cut costs on this, it's student body right and everybody does it. They lead the way.

Peter: Not only that but when they say, "We're going to go green," they actually mean it.

George: Absolutely. A lot of times they say it, they mean it, they do it, so sometimes they're leading and sometimes they're following social trends. Even though they're the size of a small country, they can't always lead the way. In this particular case, it was interesting because I - sort of I was digging in, I did the article and I went back and looked at the transcripts of one of their earnings calls. I said, "Well, this is interesting," and wrote the article that was originally going to be the 10th in the series, called them up for an interview and some other people said, "No, you've got to print this now. It's news."

Wal-Mart said, "We're in a quiet period. We can't actually talk to you," so I never actually got to interview Mike Duke. It was all based on the transcripts but what I learned from the transcripts was they'd gone into holiday last year. We know that. I think it was November 15th. They said, "We're so excited. We got this right and this right and this right," they didn't have it right. They blew the holiday. Their same-store sales were down. They had real problems in the store and I think it was by the second week of January - so this is two weeks after the end of holiday, eight weeks after they said everything was right - they got rid of their head merchandiser. They restructured their organization. They have retooled their strategy for merchandising and they're off doing something differently.

So they had a bad holiday and they made immediate changes. That's what adjusting is about.

Peter: I want you to talk to me about a real CEO disaster story and this one you actually wrote about in The Washington Post and it's titled Timeless Lessons from Time Inc: How Griffin Set The Stage For His Own Ouster. It's a profile obviously you wrote about Jack Griffin for The Washington Post leader's column.

George: He never had a chance. He killed himself on day one. He actually killed himself before day one... not kill himself, he was in trouble.

Peter: He didn't do what Ajay did at all.

George: The contrast is staggering. I guess the sub-headline is Griffin chose to shock the culture and it rejected him. If you think about it, you can do a couple of dimensions.

As you look at an organization's context, you should be able to figure out whether they have a need to change or don't have a need to change. Clearly Time had a need to change. And then you can figure out whether the culture is open to change or not open to change, and if the culture is open to change and there's no real sense of urgency around change, well that's great. You can assimilate in.

Guess what? If you're joining an organization as a senior leader, if you're being hired from the outside, probably not going to happen. If they're bringing you in from the outside, they probably think they need to change something. So very few executives get the chance to slowly assimilate in. Most of the time, they need to converge and evolve and that's because either the organization has got a need to change and it's open to change, so they'll be open to what's going on or maybe they're not so open to change but they don't need to change now so you've got time to come in and become Mr. Insider before you change it.

What Griffin decided was he had an organization that was desperately in need of change but was not open to change and he shocked it.

I think I agree with the decision to shock the culture. Where he missed was in not understanding that if you shock an organization, that's going to push back and those presidents of the magazine or the publishers of magazine weren't that excited about Griffin's name being on the top of the list. People weren't excited about a lot of the things he did, the way he did things, and they certainly weren't excited about his manifesto on day one where he published this document saying, "Here's the answer: Converge and evolve." No, he walked in with the answer. Here's the new way, I'm the emperor, follow me.

Sure, right, not going to happen.

If you're going to do that, you need to alter the balance of consequences for people so that they're strongly encouraged to help you and there's pain in not helping you and sometimes you need to get somebody else to take the fall. And there's a possibility that Griffin was really Jeff Bewkes' fall guy, the CEO of Time Warner. Maybe he knew he needed to make the change, maybe he put Griffin in knowing he was going to fail so if this was going to be his dead hero who's going to go and start the change and then people were going to follow, I doubt it. I don't think they thought it through this well but what Griffin might have done or somebody else going to shock a culture is bring somebody else to be the fall guy. The classic is you bring in some outside consultants. You bring in McKinsey.

Peter: Right.

George: And let them do their dirty work...

Peter: They're great fall guys.

George: Great fall guys. You bring them in for three, six months, they do the dirty work, they come back with the recommendation and then you say, "Okay, well you know, we can't do all this. McKinsey, you guys are really bad people, go away," and then you can be the good guy to pick up the pieces. Or you bring in a chief operating officer and you find a way when they burn themselves out to move them aside into something good. Or you bring in somebody who knows they're there on an interim basis because they know they're going to get fired in 12 months, and they're compensated that way. So they treat it like an interim assignment.

Griffin didn't do that. Griffin didn't do any of that. Griffin came in, thought he could make the change himself, didn't, couldn't, you know the end of the story.

Peter: Could he have gone in and created some allies with some of the magazine heads possibly instead of just - I mean not in day one and saying this is the way it is. If he had had some support from some of the magazine heads, it may have turned out differently for him.

George: Not after day one. If he had chose in advance to converge and evolve but rapidly. If he had chosen to come in, build the allies, flop into people's offices and say, "Hi, I'm Jack, tell me about yourself because I care about you," and gotten to know them and figured out what their needs were, figured out how the culture worked, changed it from within, sure. He didn't choose that. He chose to shock it and the minute he came out with manifesto on day one, everybody was pushing back.

Peter: George, let's circle back to the beginning of our interview where we were talking about Heidrick & Struggles and interviewing and recruiters and the last time we recorded an interview was in November of 2009 which is kind of hard to believe, but the Heidrick & Struggles of the world were in a very different position in 2009 than they are today, thankfully. From your perspective, what is the employment outlook for executives in 2011? What are you seeing out there with your clients?

George: I see it being better, but not perfect for everybody, so there are jobs whereas probably in 2009, there really weren't jobs. It didn't matter how good you were. Everybody was frozen, nobody was hiring, you saw that.

Peter: Right.

George: What we're seeing now is there are jobs. People are hiring. People are definitely hiring, but the war for talent is real. The good people are in demand. The perceived bad people are not. And what's happening now is I think there's another eight weeks of a window for the long-term unemployed senior executives. People that are wrestling with the job search should really do a sprint over the next eight weeks, because you won't have a job offered by the summer and the reason is after the summer - everybody - things just stop in the summer.

Peter: Right.

George: When they come back in the fall, people that have been unemployed for a long time are going to have an even harder time. It didn't matter so much in 2009 because there just weren't jobs.

Peter: Right.

George: Now there are jobs. Any hiring person who looks at somebody that's been unemployed for 6, 12 months, whatever, is going to be asked themselves what did other people see in this person that I'm not seeing? And there's going to be a presumption that somebody who's been unemployed for a long time is less capable, less strong, less motivated, fits less well than people that have jobs.

It's obviously not true in a lot of cases, but the long-term unemployed, they're starting in a back foot. They're starting with a black mark against them and it's going to be tough, so there are jobs. There are jobs for the talented people that have been successful, but still very tough for some of those senior level long-term unemployed people.

Peter: I think you're so right because in 2010, I think people were really willing to cut some of these folks some slack because 2009 was brutal. Everyone knew and a lot of really great people got cut not because of their capabilities but just because of the reality of the marketplace, but now they've been unemployed for as you said 12 months, 18 months, it's going to get really, really difficult especially if they're over what, 45, 50 years old.

George: Yeah but I think there's a break point on July 4th. I think if you're looking for a job, do what it takes to get the job in May and June so it's not going fun and so that means, there are always these senior executives that have been working for 20, 25 years and get laid off or downsized or right-sized or upsized or in-sized or whatever, and they say, "I haven't had a vacation; I'm going to take 6 months or 12 months off."

Peter: "I got a nice package."

George: "I got a nice package. I got however much severance. I'm going to take some time off." It's now a hard story to explain why because nobody really believes that. "You couldn't find a job." "Well, I wasn't looking for a job, I did a cruise around the world with my kids." "No you didn't." "Excuse me?"

So it's going to be tough. I would urge these people stop the vacation now, get serious about finding a job over the eight, nine weeks.

Peter: I think that's some great advice. In conclusion, is there anything you would like to share with us that we haven't discussed?

George: No, you've been terrifically wonderful and thorough as always.

Peter: Thank you.

George: Always a pleasure to talk to you.

Peter: It's always a pleasure to talk to you George and I look forward to doing it again, probably this fall when the next edition of The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan hits the shelves.

George: That will be a lot of fun. I look forward to that.

Peter: Me too. Thank you so much.

We've been speaking with George Bradt, managing director of PrimeGenesis. We welcome your comments on our interview with George. Please join our Facebook group, TotalPicture Radio to voice your thoughts and opinions. You'll find his interview, including a complete transcript, in the Leadership Channel of TotalPicture Radio, that's Totalpicture.com. While there, please sign up for our newsletter and remember you can subscribe to TPR on iTunes, just do a keyword search for TotalPicture Radio and join me on Twitter @peterclayton.

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About Peter Clayton

Peter Clayton, Producer/Host, is an award-winning producer/director of radio, television, documentary, video, interactive and Web-based media who has created breakthrough media for a wide array of Fortune 100 clients.

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